Eagle Forum Legislative Alerts

Thursday, November 01, 2012

When we list the areas that Barack Obama wants to "fundamentally transform" as he promised before his 2008 election, let's not overlook his plans for education. They are as fundamentally transformational, costly and dictatorial as ObamaCare. It's well known that public schools are not graduating students as well-educated as formerly, that Americans score poorly on international tests, and that billions of federal dollars showered on public schools have not achieved any of the designated goals, which were to raise test scores and to eliminate the gap between higher income and lower income students. The Obama progressives want us to believe that the remedy is to turn over total control to the federal government.

That's illogical and unacceptable, but it fits right in with Obama's attitude that there is no higher power than the federal government. If Obama is reelected, he will be able to accomplish this task. So the Obama Administration has latched onto a national education curriculum called Common Core standards. The plan is to induce all elementary and secondary schools to accept a comprehensive national education system that will enforce a national curriculum. The national system will be locked in by the tests students must take called assessments, which in turn are tied to teacher evaluation. The standards instruct the teachers what to teach so their pupils can pass the tests and teachers can get positive evaluations.

Common Core standards bypasses parents and state and local school boards, and will fundamentally transform every child in America by dictating what every child will learn and not learn. Common Core requires all states to adopt the same federally endorsed standards. Of course, the Obama crowd loves it because it is a national takeover of our country's entire education system.